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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. You run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing something here.